The clean-room approach created a novel legal puzzle. Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) observed that Anthropic faces a dilemma: a Python rewrite constitutes a new creative work potentially outside DMCA reach. If Anthropic claims the AI-generated transformative rewrite infringes copyright, it could undermine their own defense in training-data copyright cases - the same argument that AI-generated outputs from copyrighted inputs constitute fair use.

The only moral justification for an AI rewrite. Love it.